Independence referendum blame game heats up in Spain

MADRID — Spain’s prime minister and Catalonia’s president on Monday fired off accusations and ramped up the rhetoric over a referendum on independence.

The Catalan government has said it will hold the vote in the fall but Madrid has vowed to prevent it by any means necessary.

On Monday, Mariano Rajoy challenged Carles Puigdemont to hold a face-to-face debate in the Spanish Congress about his plans, which he labeled “political, juridical and social nonsense” in a press conference in Madrid.

The conservative Spanish leader also gave credibility to a report in El País indicating that the pro-independence majority in the Catalan parliament was planning to declare unilateral secession from Spain if the binding referendum couldn’t be held, according to a leaked draft of a bill meant to smooth the transition to an independent state.

“The blackmail and the threats that have been put on the table are intolerable," Rajoy said. "I can tell Spaniards not to worry because this will not come into force and the national sovereignty will keep being the national sovereignty as long as the majority of Spaniards want it to be.”

Puigdemont’s coalition in the Catalan parliament denied in a press statement that the leaked document was under consideration but it didn’t refute the claim that a unilateral declaration of independence was one of the options on the table if a referendum can’t be held.

The Catalan leader responded to Rajoy on Monday evening at a press conference in Madrid town hall, where a few dozen far-right activists welcomed him by shouting “Puigdemont to prison.”

The Catalan president dismissed Rajoy’s offer to debate in Congress, calling it "a fake will for dialogue,” and vowed not to take any step that would mean the “abdication" of the right to self-rule.

He said he was willing to negotiate with the central government on some details of the secession referendum, such as the timing, the precise question to be asked and the democratic guarantees of the ballot, but he would never accept anything short of a binding vote on independence. “The commitment of the Catalan government with its people is inviolable,” he said. “We will celebrate the referendum.”

Behind the heated rhetoric coming from Madrid and Barcelona lies a public relations war. “A battle over the narrative has been going on for months,” said Ferran Casas, deputy director of digital newspaper Nació Digital. “Who doesn’t want dialogue? Who doesn’t want a pact?”

But there’s also a deeper, hard-to-solve conflict that seems to be bringing the country ever closer to a high-voltage political clash.

Parties representing 70 percent of the Spanish people — Rajoy’s Popular Party, the center-left Socialists and the liberal Ciudadanos — defend the united sovereignty of the Spanish people, which includes the Catalan people. So does the country’s constitution — approved in 1978 with the support of 88 percent of voters, including more than 90 percent in Catalonia.

Pro-independence Catalan forces oppose the argument that a majority of Catalan people want to decide their future on their own.

Secessionist forces won 48 percent of the votes and an absolute majority in the parliamentary chamber in the last regional election.

Parties representing 57 percent of Catalan voters are in favor of a binding referendum for secession — although not all of them support independence. And between 36 percent and 42 percent — depending on whose figures you use — of people turned out for an informal vote on independence in 2014. (Eighty percent of those voted for secession.)

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moderateGuy

“… defend the united sovereignty of the Spanish people, which includes the Catalan people..”. Yes, I believe the French Paras were defending the, ah, “united sovereignty” of Francophone people which included Algerian people; The Russian “Green Men” defended “united sovereignty” of Russia that included Georgian provinces and Crimea, and so on, and so forth.
Aren’t you imperialists the cutesy ones?